On Mon, 2002-04-22 at 14:12, Jonathan Borden wrote:
> Dan Connolly wrote:
> >
> > So the cyclic structure above isn't entailed, under
> > Jeremy's axioms. So what? What do I, as a real-world
> > user, lose?
>
> How about, from my perspective as a real-world user, working in a real-world
> problem domain that currently uses description logic based classifications
> (e.g. SNOMED-RT, etc).
>
> Suppose there exists a disease which is defined as a cyclic structure.
??
Er... that's begging the question. No fair.
I don't expect cyclic structures to come up in normal stuff at all.
Please explain why you think cyclic structures will be necessary
to define (?) a disease.
> Suppose I have an individual defined by a set of facts, and these facts
> support the classification of the individual as being in the class of
> patients having the disease.
>
> It would be really really great if, after going to all this work to develop
> this disease classification system, the classifier were able to tell me that
> a patient having all the pathognomonic symptoms of a disease actually has
> this diagnosis.
>
> So what I would stand to lose is that what we do would not be applicable to
> the 200,000 - 400,000 term ontologies created and in clinical use -- not to
> say the least making inferences _across_ different healthcare ontologies
> e.g. MeSH, CPT, ICD, SNOMED, GALEN etc.
>
> (Figuring this out in an iterative fashion would take something approaching
> infinite time).
>
> Jonathan
--
Dan Connolly, W3C http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/